title: Making disjunctions exclusive.
abstract: This work examines how people interpret the sentential connective "or", which can be viewed either inclusively (A or B or both) or exclusively (A or B but not both). Following up on prior work concerning quantifiers (Bott & Noveck, 2004; Noveck, 2001; Noveck & Posada, 2003), which shows that the common pragmatic interpretation of "some", some but not all, is conveyed as part of an effortful step, we investigate how extra effort applied to disjunctive statements leads to a pragmatic interpretation of "or", or but not both. Experiment 1 compelled participants to wait for three seconds before answering, hence giving them the opportunity to process the utterance more deeply. Experiments 2 and 3 emphasized "or", either by visual means ("OR") or by prosodic means (contrastive stress) as another way to encourage participants to apply more effort. Following a relevance-theoretic line of argument, we hypothesized that conditions encouraging more processing effort would give rise to more pragmatic inferences and hence to more exclusive interpretations of the disjunction. This prediction was confirmed in the three experiments.
authors.affiliation: Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Lyon, France.
authors.forename: Coralie
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Chevallier
authors.forename: Ira A
authors.initials: IA
authors.lastname: Noveck
authors.forename: Tatjana
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nazir
authors.forename: Lewis
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Bott
authors.forename: Valentina
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Lanzetti
authors.forename: Dan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sperber
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D008128:Logic; D011581:Psychological Tests; D013997:Time Factors